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It’s a cluttered space. Not just a home for their vacuum cleaner, ironing board and Max’s various gym bags but a halfway house for all the stuff earmarked for charity. Joseph doesn’t find what he’s looking for so next he checks the garage. When he has no luck there, he ducks outside to the garden and investigates the shed, but it looks just like it had the night of the party.
When he returns to the house, Erin is waiting with his coffee. ‘What were you looking for?’
‘Nothing.’
‘That’s not true. Were you hunting for Drew?’
‘No.’
‘Did you get hold of Max?’
‘Not yet.’
Joseph leaves the kitchen and goes upstairs. When he gets to the first-floor landing, he finds the blood.
FORTY-THREE
It’s a fist-sized puddle, dry at the edges, still wet and glistening at the centre. Two smaller stains the size of fifty pence pieces mark the floorboards a few inches away.
Joseph stares at the blood in silence. He’s still shaking from the abrupt end to his phone call with Max, from his godawful discovery at the bungalow.
And now this.
He checks the hallway runner, the skirting board. He sees no other blood splashes, but a chunk of plaster is missing from the wall to his left, level with his nose. A few fragments lie on the floor directly beneath it.
It’s not his blood. It can’t be Erin’s. And he just talked to Max.
Oh Jesus, he thinks.Oh Jesus, oh Jesus.
Tilly.
When he stands close to his stepdaughter, he can just about see over her head. If Max had clubbed her as she came out of her room and turned towards the stairs, her skull would have hit the plaster at that exact spot. If she’d tumbled to the floor, the puddle of blood is right where she might have landed.
Joseph’s lungs have seized. He puts out a hand to thebannisters. Tries to stop himself from falling. What does he do?What?
First the dead man. Then Drew.
Now Tilly.
Just like the ground floor, all the doors up here are closed, too. He definitely doesn’t remember that from before he left the house. Is Tilly lying lifeless inside one of the bedrooms? Is Erin, drinking coffee downstairs, the oblivious mother of a dead daughter? Just like Enoch is an oblivious father?
There’s a sickening pressure inside Joseph’s head, as if a major artery is about to burst. Max might be his primary reason for living, but Tilly has been a reason for living, too. Since their first meeting in that Hampton Court bistro, they’ve become like father and daughter. Could he possibly stand by his son if he’s done this?
Of course not, a part of his mind shrieks.Of course not!
He grips the bannisters, forces his eyes to return to that stain. Then he steps over it, opens his bedroom door. Tilly isn’t there. Crossing the hall, careful to avoid the blood, Joseph opens all the remaining doors. He doesn’t find his stepdaughter behind any of them.
He has to tell Erin what he’s discovered up here, he has to, even though he knows that in her terror she’ll call the police. He won’t have the right to stop her. To even consider it would be monstrous.
Joseph takes a breath, breathes it out. Then, recalling his conversation with Ralph Erikson, he closes his eyes, gets down on his good knee and presses his hands together. ‘Claire,’ he whispers. ‘Claire, please. I’m listening. For the first time, I’m really listening, but you’ve got to talk to me. Right now, right this very moment, you’ve got to talk to me, because I really don’t know what to do.’
He empties his mind of thought, concentrates on nothingbut his breathing. It hitches, smooths. Hitches, smooths. Hitches, smooths, smooths.
Darkness, a rushing of sound. Silence, then that rushing sound again. As if he’s caught inside a giant lung. Or a tunnel through which air is racing in steady pulses.
A memory forms. And then it’s more than a memory. Suddenly, Joseph isn’t kneeling in his upstairs hallway but bending over an incomprehensible network of pipes and tubes: white ones and clear ones, straight ones and articulated ones. Around him machines suck and whir and beep. Somewhere inside all that equipment lies Claire Carver. And now, at last, he sees her; a part of her, at least. A triangle of smooth cheek. A closed eye.
The machines are doing his wife’s breathing and keeping her body alive. Claire’s brain, the doctors have told him, is already dead. They haven’t yet asked his permission to turn off life support, but he knows that conversation is coming. For now, he just needs to stand here and process the unutterable cruelty of what he’s seeing.